Welcome to Novel Histories!

This is a blog about the discoveries I’ve made while writing historical fiction. We’ll look at the expected, unexpected and downright bizarre, and have a laugh doing it.

I am not a historian, but I do have a PhD in engineering, which taught me to study everything in painstaking, granular detail. My thesis and subsequent papers are best described as cures for insomnia. If you need help getting to sleep, you can find them here.

But you won’t be burdened with sterile facts on Novel Histories. Yes, you might learn something (I’ll provide links that may lead you down strange rabbit holes on the internet… ok, to bookshops), but mostly I hope that you’ll get a good giggle out of our sometimes not-so-illustrious ancestors.

As I’m currently studying and writing about antiquity, the posts in the foreseeable future will be on ancient Rome and Jerusalem. Antiquity was a time of petulant gods, defecating in the streets (the mortals, not the gods), and a prince determined to impress his dad by killing an elephant, standing right under its belly, poking upwards furiously with his sword. Sometimes, fellow humans, I’m amazed that we’ve made it this far.

Happy reading!